MEN

A LitCafe🔥 production

When my son wanted to wear his “ballgown-dress” to the Snow Ball his elementary school hosted a few weeks ago (kids running around in a dark gym with glowsticks / loud music), we said sure, of course, and helped him squeegee himself into it (I think it was made for a four-year-old and he a six and made exclusively of black-hole-dense muscle).

But we had that uneasy feeling you get when you’re not sure whether you should tell your kid how shitty the world is. Do you let them discover it, and hope the fullness and purity of their heart will sustain them through the snot-inducing sting of the sucker punch?

Or do you become a harbinger of the already hurtling fecal matter, hoping that you will somehow absorb some of it for them by playing messenger, and then mostly end up feeling like the bully-culture took all the marbles home, plus fashioned you into its personal douchebag along the way?

We went with option one, holding our breath and crossing our fingers as we ushered the neon-headed child in his beautiful red-and-gold dress, jeans, and sneakers into the dance (followed by his sister, also in ballgown-dress, but blue. The only reason she got the heels was her feet are smaller.)

The third option, which we didn’t consider, was “or maybe it’ll go great.” Five minutes after our arrival, he was blasting through the gymnasium at top speed in his ballgown-dress, with several little girls sprinting after him, shouting “H! Wait!! We love your dress!” I couldn’t have been happier with the world in that moment.

That’s kind of what I want to look at today. How pieces of our world are going great. Even specifically when it comes to men.

Our country may largely cleave to a disastrous model for masculinity—at best a suffocation cell, and at worst, a complete wasteland of humanity that celebrates solipsism, narcissism, disavowal, gaslighting, and more direct forms of cruelty, and works about as hard as it can to deny the fundamentally relational nature of our evolution and survival as a species.

BUT that doesn’t mean there aren’t phenomenal men, model humans who happen to be men. Men who have worked hard and continue to labor for their senses of their own identities, their ways of perceiving and making meaning, and their dispositions towards others, both loved and not—and are actively attuning these phenomena daily, putting in the hard and often painful work of reciprocal aliveness with other forms of sentience.

These men are actively going out and feeling and being in the world with sensitivity, strength, tenderness, honesty, and a deep, opening, nurturing intelligence. While most of us are stuck at a rest stop arguing over junk food, threatening to beat each other to a pulp over scraps we don’t even really like and which are replete with ethylene glycol and red dye no. 40, these men are the brave ones, among the true leaders of our continued evolution, who seek out, reveal, and assemble the stuff of nurturance. Of surviving, yes, but also of thriving.

I think we need and deserve some time with this kind of men, and I have two of them in mind, some of their books splayed open on the couch next to me.

Geoffrey Babbitt and Oliver Bendorf take up where what our culture allows us of masculinity leaves off. These two torch bearers for responsiveness harbor a remarkably tenacious and elegant receptivity. These are men who can hitch their brains to their hearts and tap into both the fierce individuality of experience and its uncanny oneness. In other words, here are a couple men who have done, and continue to do, the work. Their work, in addition to being important, also happens to be beautiful, engaging, and moving.

Let’s snuggle in with some of their poems and see what fortitude they can gift us for these crummy, scummy times.

*

I’ll begin with Geoff Babbitt, who speaks to and from the need, the human requirement, for art.

The following poem opens his book appendices pulled from a study on light, a title which tells me a lot about what I most want and need to be around— for example, a consciousness that pays the kind of attention that results in collecting strange and beautiful moments, a consciousness which wishes to study, come into contact, and comprehend in new ways; a consciousness drawn to and suffused with light.

PROEM: RARE HALO

A need to arc is where it starts.

As in the arc of morning light,

A halo above the first frost clinging

to the grass,

Above the hoary shadow’s shape the garage casts,

above the garage.

A halo leaves no story.

A halo becomes the arc it needs.

The arc of telling

grants death once begun,

which it perpetually begins.

A need to arc is where it starts.

Morning light pinwheeled in a sparrow’s

//// eye, for instance.

Any arc is a form of play,

and light is always open.

A halo above the first frost,

Light strikes the blue garage,

and the light opens out.

A need to arc is under way.

Which goes right through us.

Here’s a man who opens with need. How many men do you know who will acknowledge the phenomenon of need at all, much less lead with it? Need itself signals vulnerability, humanity, mortality, and opens the portal for connection. And hold up, hold up—it feels… good. It really feels nice to have someone open a damn book by acknowledging and naming a need. This dude doesn’t mess around with disavowal or aloofness or any of that garbage we seem to require of ourselves but most especially of men. He gets it. Everything’s already galloping, in word two. And that need which he names is “to arc,” which is a connecting movement.

And though we move through some austerity, with “frost” and “shadow,” there is aliveness in the “clinging,” and a sense of aeration, something like hope or spaciousness, in the stanza choosing to end on “above the garage.” It’s like he’s pointing up. Have you ever stood outside a grocery store and stared up at the sky? People who notice you will look up too, and they’ll be confused if you’re not looking at anything in particular, but it doesn’t matter, it’s actually kind of great, because now you’ve both looked up, which changes the quality of your day. Looking up is like taking a lid off of existence for a moment. Thanks, Geoff— childlike wonder, another thing people and especially men aren’t allowed to do! Bravo.